Interview answered by Dr. Birgit Schmidt from Göttingen State and University Library, Scientific Manager / Project Coordinator Electronic Publishing.

1.    Does your organization have an open access strategy? And how are you implementing it?

With the aim to make the research results of its researchers as widely accessible and usable as possible, the University of Göttingen jointly with the University Medical Center Göttingen adopted an updated open access policy in 2016. All publications should be accessible and reusable without restrictions in order to foster research and innovation processes in science, economy and society. The university provides advice and assistance to researchers for putting the policy into practice, in particular through the services management by Göttingen State and University Library (e.g. OA repositories and Göttingen University Press). In addition, an open access publication fund is available to all affiliated researchers. The fund is co-funded by the German Research Foundation and funds by the university and the medical centre. It enables researchers to publish in pure open access journals and applies when a researcher does not have access to third-party funding for publication.

2.    Are you facing any challenges to integrate an open access culture in your University? If yes, what kind of challenges? And how are you overcoming them?

Authors are asked to deposit a copy of their publications immediately upon publication into GoeScholar, the institutional open access repository. However, this is not a common practice yet. The publication fund is much more popular among researchers, in particular in science, technology and medical fields. The university is currently developing a platform to better manage and present all research outcomes online: Göttingen Research Online. This service builts on internal and external data sources, and makes it very easy for researchers to manage their portfolio and may trigger a stronger interest to make publications open accessible as well. Another challenge is to sustain the institutional publication fund.

3.    What are your open access strategy and objectives for the coming years?

The university’s open access strategy is closely linked to its strategy for the management of research data (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/488918.html), and the implementation of open science at institutional, national and international levels. On a European scale, the University of Göttingen is actively engaged in the creation of e-infrastructures for open scholarship and support the implementation of funder policies. Through open science projects the university is exploring and establishing good practices, e.g. on training for open science and open peer review. A primer on how open access works is provided through the information platform open-access.net; it was build up jointly with the Universities of Konstanz and Bielefeld, and the Free University of Berlin.

4.    Open in order to…

…foster research and innovation processes in research, economy and society.